Imagenomic Portraiture

Inside the red circle in the image above, are your viewing options. This is pretty standard for all applications like this and includes all the usual suspects: Full screen, split screen, full screen “before”, and full screen “after”

The rest of the interface has been divided into five sections (more details on these portrait editing options below).

One: Smooth out the detail areas in your image

Two: Set the range of your skin tones to be masked

Three: Image enhancements

Four: View the mask you made in number 2, above

Five: Navigate around your image

But even before jumping into these, you will most likely want to begin with your…

Presets

You will definitely find this the very first place you should start in your portrait editing workflow.

There are a good number of Presets here. If one of them doesn’t get you where you want to go, you’ll usually find a Preset that will. At least that’s my situation with these. It’s probably no surprise, but I usually don’t find a Preset that gets me exactly to the finished portrait — regarless of whether it’s the Presets from Imagenomic’s Portraiture Professional, onOne’s PerfectPortrait, or Anthropics’ PortraitProfessional. But they can get close.

I always end up doing some slider tweaking, but Portraiture Pro does do a very nice job of getting me quite close. In fact, there were a few images in my review test where the Preset default was about 90% there. But in the vast majority, definitely tweak the sliders!

You can view your Presets either by name or by image and name together. A feature I really like here is that you can drag a slider to increase the size of the thumbnails. I like this one a lot because you can get a much better idea of what effect is going to come in before you select it. There are alot of nice Presets all the way to extreme contrast stuff.

Detail Smoothing

Here’s where a lot of the good stuff happens in removing or reducing wrinkles, blotchy skin, etc. This is a powerful tool and it pays to try different settings for your Fine, Medium, and Large details. It didn’t take me long to get the effect I wanted. Use the Threshold slider to control how strongly you bring your smoothing effect in.

Another nice feature here is that you can manually select different standard portrait sizes. Yes, there is an Auto Detect selection, but I did find on just a few test portaits I used that the results were slightly better after manually selecting a size. I don’t know why this is, but I guess the lesson is that if your portrait is a standard size, select it, just in case.

Skin Tones Mask

You might very well want to make a mask so only the skin tones are seeing your adjustments and this is the place to do it.

You can choose an eyedropper and click in your image to start fixing these skin tones — adding to, or removing from the mask.

As you can see, my mask is white and it’s done a pretty good job with this image. The only overlap is the fence behind the woman. This was basically impossible to remove because the tones were virtually identical to those of the skin. An option that would be nice here would be a brush to paint your mask.

Apart from that, I could get excellent control over tweaking the mask with the sliders.

Feathering: Controls how sharp the edge of the mask will be.

Opacity: Set to zero, no portrait editing effects will be seen so this gives you control over how strongly, on a global scale, your portrait editing work will appear. Set to maximum, all will come in to the full extent you set.

Fuzziness: This is very useful as it controls the extent to which the Mask is applied. Set to maximum, your portrait editing effects will affect the entire image. As you slide to the left, the Mask tightens up and your portrait editing effects are constrained to a smaller area. This is a very handy way to ensure that your portrait editing affects only the skin!

Show Mask: Select the color in which to view your mask. Even though it shows “None”, I changed it later to “White” – which is seen in the Mask Preview — just to clear up any confusion.

Eyedroppers: Selectively add to, or remove from the mask.

Hue/Saturation/Luminance: Control the skin tones to be edited.

Latitude: Control how much of a range of skin tones will be included in your further portrait editing.

Enhancements

Not much to explain here, really. The slider names pretty much do that for me.

This is yet another really nice portrait tweaking feature of Portrait Professional.

The Warmth, of course, slides to the right for a warmer, more yellow-ish feel. And to the left makes your portrait cooler and more blueish.

Sepia is one of my most favorite effects and here you can bring in that in with the Tint slider (there’s a Preset for that, too). You can also bring in the full spectrum of tints here.

Output and Mask Preview

The Output selections are real important to me because I usually bring the portrait back into Photoshop for some last-minute, minor tweaking. (In reality, it’s just so I knowthat I can do that in the future if I want.)

Anyway, this is a real handy feature for making layers. You could make the selection its own layer or even create a transparency mask.

The Mask Preview window shows you exactly what your mask is looking like.